I like Heroku. We’ve recently made our first deployment on it, and all things considered, I don’t think we could’ve made a better platform choice at this time. Deploying to Heroku taught me quite a few things, easily the most important of them was hearing about the 12 Factor App methodology. If you haven’t heard of it1, it’s basically a way to design web applications thus that deploying them will be less of a pain in the arse. The methodology’s manifest was written by @hirodusk, Heroku’s CTO, who probably knows something about cloud deployments. The best thing about it is that it’s elegantly platform/language neutral – so theoretically you don’t need to deploy a 12 Factor App to Heroku, you can deploy to any 12 Factor App compatible PaaS (had there been any), or even roll your own 12 Factor App platform and deploy there. Then again, why not focus on your core business and pay Heroku to use their awesome 12 Factor App platform? Well, ugh. Like I said, if you’re thinking about deploying to Heroku then you probably should, but I’d like to warn you that I don’t think Heroku is an excellent implementation of a 12 Factor App platform.

It’s a good implementation, yes, sometimes maybe just good enough. It saddens me to say it, but I feel there’s significant disparity between the force and clarity I see in the 12 Factor App theory and what I perceive as murky, surprising or faulty implementation details in the Heroku practice. I will try to illustrate exactly what I mean in this post, after these public service announcements: (1) I’ll be using 12 Factor & Heroku jargon freely, so you’d really gain the most from this if you’re familiar with both; (2) the Heroku deployment I did is in Python, so the only stack I know is Celadon Cedar; (3) some of the pain points I mention are related and may be fixed by a single Heroku change, but they still hurt in different ways and finally (4) I’m not looking for cheap shots: I know Heroku’s been grilled for their recent outages, but if you dig in my Twitter feed you’ll see proof that this post has been in the making for a while now, and has nothing to do with this or that outage (maybe a topic in itself, but not now).

Handling of static assets is a broken mess

Other people wrote enough about strategies to deal with the fact that Cedar has no ‘official’ way to serve static files as Bamboo had. I can’t say I’m happy Heroku’s own documentation about this important issue – for example, the introduction to django document conveniently sidesteps the issue altogether. But of all the various solutions out there, I didn’t find one that alleviates the much uglier (from a 12 Factor App perspective) underlying issue. See, your statics will either reside in your slug or elsewhere. If you plan on putting them in the slug, you can either compile2 them during slug creation (with a custom buildback, what else), or locally on your computer and push them. Slug creation time is at best an annoying environment to work with and debug on, if not for anything else (and there is a lot of else), then because of the lack of Polyglotism and the prevalence of multi language asset management tools (also, good luck building Flash/Silverlight/other necessary evils during slug creation).

So you opt to build locally, ignoring the alarm bells as you shatter factors I, V and X (at least). How will you get the built statics to Heroku? You’ll commit and push build products to your VCS, right <puke/>? And who guarantees two deployments will be identical, since you’re developing on Linux and your coworker on OSX? This goes on. The ramifications of serving your statics from an external storage service are the same, but now you also need to get your files to the storage service. But how? You aren’t supposed to have your S3 secrets on your dev machine, and Heroku’s support for configuration-during-slug-creation has serious caveats and a frightening warning attached to it. This is a serious wart, and I don’t think writing documentation will solve it (it will be better than nothing!), because I don’t see how this can be solved with the building blocks Heroku offers today (the buildpack mechanism as it is, git transport, etc). An nontrivial change is needed for truly awesome 12 Factor static support. I don’t always expect much from my PaaS, but when I do, it’s because I pay five cents per dyno hour.

There’s no buffering proxy in Cedar

This one isn’t even funny. If you’re not sure what a buffering reverse proxy is or why you need one if your server uses sync workers, you must read this. Summarizing for the impatient, sync workers are resource hogs, so you never want them idling about waiting clients (which might be slow). A common pattern is to have a cheap async “thing” buffering between your sync workers and the wild Internet. As far as “async things” go, nginx is a great choice, and indeed Heroku’s previous stack, Bamboo, used to use it. However, in Cedar it disappeared, with very serious ramifications. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not too happy with Bamboo’s behaviour, either: it’s very possible an app wouldn’t want buffering: sometimes you want to read the request as it comes along (for example, for various Comet techniques), and you’re designed to handle it (mostly by making the app itself your “async thing”). Bottom line, a one-HTTP-layer-fits-all treatment is at best an inconvenience, and possibly something much worse.

Indeed, you could solve this by simply using async workers, but one does not “simply” use async workers (there are serious ramifications which are out of scope for now). Choosing your threading model based on a missing feature in your platform sucks, not to mention if you already have a working and field-proven codebase you’re migrating to this platform. I guess the best approach to solve this would be to have a Routefile at the root of the project describing the routes to reach your app: this URL over buffered HTTP, this URL over raw HTTP, maybe even that port over plain old raw UDP. But even if you don’t have this feature, I’d expect warnings, explanations and best-practices to be sprayed all over the documentation. Alas, the documentation doesn’t help even one bit (on the contrary sometimes; I judge this FAQ answer to be somewhere between misleading and plain wrong). To top it all, it seems that activating Heroku’s SSL support suddenly makes you go through something which smells to me like remnants from Bamboo, with sudden appearance of nginx and buffered requests. Again, all in utter silence from the documentation.

Polyglot programming’s great, but not on Heroku

I hear the term polyglot programming in relation to Heroku all the time. “A true polyglot platform”, they say. I don’t get these claims. Heroku isn’t polyglot. The buildpack mechanism (a good idea in itself) is built in such a way that buildpacks are given a chance to detect if your push matches their language, but the first matching buildpack is used to create your app’s slug, ignoring all other buildpacks and potential languages. So your app really has to be in one language. The workarounds are horrendous, the least-horrific one is done by the official Ruby buildpack which “vendors” node.js into the slug if a certain gem (execjs) is required in the Gemfile. Of course, it’s just a package specific hack, it inflates the slugs needlessly, and since it’s just a hack, similar support isn’t built into the Python buildpack for the PyExecJS Python package. Admittedly, for the latter point, the brilliance of custom buildpacks eases the pain it sure as heck doesn’t cure it.

A thousand cuts: the smaller things

I think separating you from your application (i.e., you’re unable to ssh into a running slug) is brilliant and leads to better design overall. But when I worked on XIV’s grid storage product, I fought to keep controlled ssh access to the discrete storage modules open (for us developers, not for customers), and I think Heroku should provide the same. Show me a big warning, let me click through whatever, but then let me bloody attach my strace/pdb/etc to my running instance.

I applaud factor X, dev/prod parity, but Heroku and especially its add-ons force me to integrate with backing services with unknown and possibly changing configuration. I think a Vagrant box providing a Cedar-like dev environment with some add-ons could help here. This bit me once as I misused the parsed results of REDISTOGO_URL and ignored the password (it was a bit more complex than that, but I see you yawning). A trivial bug really, but it was time consuming to diagnose, because it worked fine against my password-less development Redis (which now does require a password, thank you very much).

Factor III, configuration, says you should store configuration in the environment. But Heroku offers nothing to help you set this environment up during development, and share it across a team of five developers. Sure it’s a small thing to arrange on your own, but together with other small cuts regarding local development, I feel Heroku does too little to accommodate multi-developer teams, period (update: since I first wrote this, @kennethreitz wrote autoenv, which is a good first step in the right direction).

Putting everything (your language’s runtime, “vendored” binaries, possibly static assets) in your slug makes it easy to go past the 25mb warning mark, and forces you to be tight fisted about slug size. I understand the cause of this limitation, but if every dyno had more stuff built into it, things could be easier and I wouldn’t be counting mere megabytes of disk space in 2012 (just node, Python, Ruby, some C libraries… don’t think I’m asking for much).

I’ve been pulling my hair out wondering why my video processing worker dynos are getting R14 “Memory Quota” exceeded warnings, and only after I instrumented my code to take memory snapshots (ps -ef + cat /proc/meminfo at relevant timings) I got to suspecting that buffer cache is counted against me in my memory quota (why isn’t this documented? why can’t Heroku’s support resolve my ticket asking for explanations regarding my ps -ef outputs for a few weeks now?). We get false R14 positives all the time.

git is a terrific DVCS, but a poor deployment transport – see for example above how it complicates things with deploying compiled static files, or how it makes pushing private submodules impossible (at least now there’s some labs support for submodules).

There’s more, of course, but this post is already insanely long and I feel I got the main things off my chest. I humbly argue that some of these issues actually have a very material impact on Heroku app development/deployment while being not so hard for Heroku to fix, or at least make much more bearable or even just thoroughly documented. You could say many (all?) these things aren’t so bad if you’re a single developer developing a very early prototype and expecting little load, but I think these issues quickly become much worse in a complex professional project with multiple developers and even modest-medium load, which is who I imagine is Heroku’s prime target audience, rather than some Jekyll blog that gets 50 hits per day.

I’d like to close this post with repeating that I like Heroku, and at our current size, I definitely like it more than the alternatives (because deployment is such a bitch). They have many awesome things going that I didn’t list here, others wrote enough favorite reviews as it is. But Heroku still has a lot of hard work to do to get their implementation of a 12 Factor App platform on par with the elegance of the theory itself. I get the feeling the “D” stack beyond Cedar is right around the corner; I’ll be so happy to use a better Heroku 12 Factor stack. Or anyone else’s 12 Factor stack, for that matter. I’m an unloyal bastard this way. Challenge accepted, anyone?

1 If you’re not familiar with The 12 Factor App, I wholeheartedly recommend you go read it right now, it’s an important read. If you’ve got your act together with regard to web app deployment you probably do many/all of these things instinctively, but still, the 12 Factor App puts things in terseness and clarity I didn’t see before and I feel insisting on it (almost to the letter) really helped me design a better app.

2 The way I see it, the toughest thing about static assets is the fact that most of them became sneakily dynamic without us watching. Sprites, CoffeeScript, LESS/scss, heck, even .swf if you have to use them (webcams, anyone?) – they’re all compiled assets with a source form and a built form (sometimes more than one; minimized vs unminimized CoffeeScript, for instance). I think this complicates separation of build time vs. run time and minimization of dev/prod parity. I wrote more about this previously.

So today I ran into the question of incrementing a counter in a RESTful manner, and wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. Googling around a bit didn’t find me a satisfactory answer, though I did find @idangazit asked the same question on Stack Overflow, but alas the question was answered by what I humbly felt was an inadequate answer.

Idan had “PUT vs. POST” in his question, but quoting the answer I just added to that question (#selfplagiarism!), I believe PATCH is the answer as RFC 2068 says very well:

The PATCH method is similar to PUT except that the entity contains a list of differences between the original version of the resource identified by the Request-URI and the desired content of the resource after the PATCH action has been applied. The list of differences is in a format defined by the media type of the entity (e.g., “application/diff”) and MUST include sufficient information to allow the server to recreate the changes necessary to convert the original version of the resource to the desired version.

So, for example, to update profile 123’s view count, I would do (using requests, what else?):

Where the x-counters media type (which I just made up) is made of multiple lines of field operator scalar tuples. views + 1, views = 500, views - 1 or views + 3 are all valid syntactically (but some may be forbidden semantically). I can understand some frowning-upon making up yet another media type, but I think this approach matches the intention of the RFC quite well, it’s extremely simple and if the backend is implemented correctly, it’s atomically correct.

Suggestions for another approach?

EDIT: I’ve had a long discussion with a friend who disliked the use of a non-standard media type. Perhaps something like this is better, though I’m still not entirely convinced:

I’m not sure what’s the bigger crime – using a non-standard media type, which, in the words of the RFC, is “discouraged”, or using a standard generic serialization format as the media type, which doesn’t say much about the scheme you’d like to use within it. Both are better than anything else I can think of.

p.s.: escaping spaces in field names are left as an exercise to the reader, I suggest application/x-www-form-urlencoded or simply using sane field names, ffs.

I used to think serving static files (aka static assets) is really easy: configure nginx to serve a directory and you’re done. But things quickly became more complicated as issues like asset compilation, CDNs/scalability, file-specific custom headers, deployment complexity and development/production parity rear their ugly heads. Judging by the huge number of different asset management packages on djangopackages, it seems like I’m not the only one who ran into this problem and felt not-entirely-satisfied with all the other solutions out there. Things actually took a turn for the worse ever since I started drinking the Heroku cool-aid, and for the live of me I just can’t make sense of their best-practice with regard to serving static files. The heroku-django quickstart conveniently sidesteps the issue of statics, and while there are a fewsupportarticles that lightly touch on neighboring subjects, nothing I found was spot-on and hands-on (this is an exception to the rule; the Heroku cool-aid is otherwise very tasty and easy to drink, to my taste so far). Ugh, why can’t there be a silver bullet to solve all this? Let me tell you about my “wishlist” for the best static serving method evar.

First, I want to be able to take any checkout from my VCS, maybe run an easy bootstrap function, and get a working development environment with statics served. In production, I want to serve my statics from a CDN with aggressive caching, so I need some versioning system, but I’d like to minimize deployment complexity and I want fine-grained cache invalidation of my statics. I want my statics to be served the same way (same headers, same versioning mechanism) in development and production without having to update two different locations (i.e., my S3 syncing script and my development nginx configuration). I also don’t want to have to “garbage-collect” my old statics from S3 every so and so days. Like I said, I’d like some of my statics to be served with some bells and whistles, like various custom headers (Access-Control-Allow-Origin, anyone?) or gzip compression. Speaking of bells and whistles, how about a whole marching band, since I want to serve statics that require compilation (minify/concatenate/compile scss+coffe/spritalize/etc), but I don’t want to have to rerun a ‘build process’ every time I touch a coffee script file in development. Finally, and this isn’t something I’m not very adamant about, but I prefer my statics to be served from a different subdomain (static, not www), I think it’s cleaner, I don’t need my clients’ cookies with every static request and it allows for some tricks (like using a CDN with support for a custom origin).

And nothing I found does all that, definitely not easily. In my dream, there’s a package called django-static-upstream, which is designed to provide a holistic approach to all these issues. I’m thinking:

a pure Python/django static HTTP server (probably just django.views.static with support for the bells and whistles as mentioned above), and yeah, I think I should bloody use this server as a backend to serve my in production

a “vhost” middleware that will replace request.urlconf based on the Host: header; if the host starts with some prefix (say, static), the request will be served by the webserver above

a couple of template tags like {% static "images/logo.png" %} that will create content-hashed links to the static webserver (i.e., //static.example.com/829dd67168a3/images/logo.png); the static server will know to ignore the content-hash bit

this isn’t really up to the package, but it should be built to support easily setting a custom-origin supporting CDN (like CloudFront) as the origin URL; this is both to serve the statics from nearby edges CDN but also (maybe more importantly) to serve as a caching reverse proxy so the dynamic server will be fairly idle

support for compiling some static types on the fly (coffeescript, scss, etc) and returning the rendered result; the result may have to be cached using django’s cache (keyd by a content hash), but this is more to speed up multi-browser development where there is no CDN to serve as a reverse caching proxy than because I worry about production

So now I’m thinking maybe I should write something like this. There are two reasons I’m blogging about a package before I even wrote it; first, since I wanted to flesh out in my mind what is it that I want from it. But second, and more importantly, because I’d like to tread carefully (1) before I have the hubris to start yet another assets related django package, (2) before I start serving static content with a dynamic language (what am I, mad?) and (3) because compiling static assets on runtime in violation of the fifth factor in Adam Wiggins’ twelve-factor app manifesto (what, you didn’t read it yet? what’s wrong with you?). These are quite a few warning signs to cross, and I’d like to get some feedback before I go there. But I honestly think I’ll be happier if I had a package to do all this, I don’t think writing it should be so hard and I hope you’d be happy using it, too.

Here’s a small function that walks over any* Python object and yields the objects contained within (if any) along with the path to reach them. I wrote it and am using it to validate a deserialized datastructure, but you can probably use it for many things. In fact, I’m rather surprised I didn’t find something like this on the web already, and perhaps it should go in itertools.

Edit: Since the original post I added infinite recursion protection following Eli and Greg’s good advice, added Python 3 compatibility and did some refactoring (which means I had to add proper unit test). You will always be able to get the latest version here, on ActiveState’s Python Cookbook (at least until it makes its way into stdlib, fingers crossed…).

"any" is a strong word and Python is flexible language; I wrote this function to work with container objects that respect the ABCs in the collections module, which mostly cover the usual builtin types and their subclasses. If there’s something significant I missed, I’d be happy to hear about it.

Update: As you can see in the comments below, and as I feared, it turned out that Lluís Batlle i Rossell already implemented something much like Enqueue, only better in many regards. I doubt I’ll keep maintaining enqueue, there’s no reason to. Oh well, it was a nice afternoon project.

Something that always bugged me with my shell workflow is the problem of queueing commands to run one after the other, while adding commands to the queue as they previous commands are being executed.

Take, for example, a simple usecase: we want to move three large files from diskA to diskB. The problem is that you don’t know the name of the files in advance, perhaps because you’re renaming them manually and it takes you time to type, or because you’re hunting for them in the directory tree, or whatever. Here are some solutions to this:

Start one command in the background, then do something like fg ; second-command. Then prepare the third command, but only run it after you saw the second finished. Meh. Or,

Just let the jobs run concurrently in the background as you run them (using the & control operator). But since each command is maxing out a resource (CPU, disk, etc), this becomes woefully inefficient really quickly. Or,

Use a mad concoction of Ctrl-Z, fg/bg, wait n or (if you left the shell and want to add something to the queue) use a madder concoction of while pgrep -f 'mv /disk/A/foo' > /dev/null; do ... (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the frustrated reader to finish that little one liner). But then again, you could also spend that time getting a paper-cut at the edge of your nostril, and it would probably be just as much fun and maybe even less error prone. Or,

Start a shell process reading from a named pipe (mkfifo(1)), and write the commands to the named pipe (credit to my friend and colleague m0she for this sneaky idea). In practice, I found it unwieldy at best, and impossible to extend with bells-and-whistle features if you need them, first and foremost, easily listing the queue and your position in it.

I reckon you could think of a few more ways, but I doubt (and hope! :) none would be more convenient than to simply use Enqueue, a simple and hopefully lightweight Python/twisted command line queuer (written today by yours truly). Usage looks a bit like so:

Nice and easy. Enqueue is still a bit rough around the edges and not very feature rich, but it does the job for me and I hope you’d like it too. Queues are managed by a twisted daemon that talks to the CLI client over UNIX domain sockets, and the whole thing fits in about 300 lines of Python. Feel free to open issues/send pull requests on GitHub if you find bugs or want to suggest something, I’ll try to keep up. Promise.

p.s.: Why is it that every time I dabble in Python packaging I end up (a) horribly frustrated and (b) feeling the result is awfully inadequate? Yes, I know I could probably package enqueue better, I know packaging isn’t Python’s strongest side and I know the future is better than the present, but the present sucks and I just had to say this. Yeah, I also walk around in the summertime sayin’ “how about this heat”.

When using UNIX, every now and then you run into a relatively unknown command line application which, once you master it, becomes part of your “first class” commands along with cut or tr. You wince every time you work on a computer that doesn’t have it (and promptly wget-configure-make-install it) and you’re amazed your colleagues never heard of it. I often feel pv is such a command for me. Really, this command, much like netcat, should have been written in Berkley sometime circa 1985 and be in every /usr/bin today. Alas, somehow Hobbit only wrote netcat in 1996, and it took a long while for for it to reach /usr/bin ubiquity. Similarly, Andrew Wood only wrotepv in 2002, and I hope this post will convince you to place it in all your /usr/local/bins today and convince distribution makers to promote it to the status of a standard package as soon as possible.

The basic premise of pv is simple – it’s a program that copies stdin to stdout, while richly displaying progress using terminal graphics on stderr. If you use UNIX a lot and you never heard of pv before, I’m pretty sure the lightbulb is already lit above your head (if not, maybe pv isn’t for you after all or maybe it would help if you’d take a look this review of pv to help you see why it’s so great). pv has evolved rather nicely over the years, it’s available from Ubuntu universe for a while now (why only universe? why??), and it has a slew of useful features, like rate limiting, ETA prediction for an expected amount of data, on-the-fly parameter change (increase/decrease rate limit without breaking the pipe!), multiple invocation support (measure speed in two different points of the pipe!) and so on.

If you’re using pv, I hope you may want to see some of the recipes I use it in; if you don’t, maybe they’ll whet your appetite (I’m using long options for pv and short options for everything else):

There are several elements that make absolutely certain the page you’re reading in your browser is an accurate representation of the resource the HTTP server meant to send you1. Disregarding caching for a minute, we have two elements making sure the representation you get is protected from errors. The first protecting element is, of course, TCP, making sure that if the server wrote two-hundred bytes in a particular order, either they’ll all arrive to your end (in order and without errors) or your TCP stack will realize something bad happened and give your user-agent (your browser) a chance to cope with the error. The need for the second protecting element is a bit more sneaky: TCP will guarantee everything the server wrote will arrive, i.e., bytes for which the server called write(2) or equivalent will arrive (or you’ll know something went wrong). But what about bytes the server should have written but didn’t write all – for example, because some component on the server’s side failed?

The original HTTP (HTTP 0.9, 1996 time) didn’t cope with this situation at all. The signal to the client that the server finished talking was to disconnect the TCP session, which, from the client’s side, is a vague signal. Did the TCP server disconnect because it finished or because it ran into trouble (software fault, sysadmin action, kernel behaviour due to memory pressure or even a bug, etc)? Thankfully, current HTTP kicks in to complement TCP, allowing the server to do one of several things in order to make sure you’ll at least know you didn’t receive the whole picture. By far the two most common thing the server will do are to specify a Content-Length in the response’s header or to use a Transfer-Encoding, most probably chunked transfer encoding.

Content length is simple to grasp. The server wishes to say 200 bytes. It explicitly says: “I will say 200 bytes” in the response header. If the user-agent didn’t receive 200 bytes of response, it knows something went wrong. Chunked transfer encoding is only slightly more complex – the server will send the response in chunks, each chunks prefixed by the length of the chunk. The end of the document is marked by a zero-length chunk. So if the user-agent saw a chunk cut in the middle, or didn’t receive a zero-length chunk, it also knows something went wrong and has a chance to decide what to do about it. For example, when faced with incorrect content length, Chrome displays an ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED error, whereas Firefox would display the portion of the page it did receive. Different behaviour, yes, but at least both user-agents in this example had a chance realize the response they received is partial. Which is really, really important, you know why? I’ll tell you why.

Enter caching. HTTP caching is a non-trivial matter with many unexpected gotchas and pitfalls, and I can’t cover it all here (why the complexity? I think it’s because all caching is an intentional form of data/state repetition, and repetition is something that in my experience humans often have difficulty reasoning about). By far the best document I know about HTTP caching is this splendid guide, but if you’re in a hurry or impatient, let me summarize the points interesting for this particular post. First, caches might exist in many places, some of them might be surprising, some of them might be slightly broken or at least very aggressive (ISP transparent caches, mutter mutter cough cough). Second, among many other things, HTTP caching lets a server give a client a token together resource, telling the client “next time you request this resource, tell me you have this token; maybe I’ll just tell you that the representation you got with this token is still fresh, without transferring it all over again”. This is called an ETag, and the response that says “just use what you have in your cache” is called HTTP 304 NOT MODIFIED.

How is this relevant to HTTP responses cut in the middle? Well, if servers didn’t have a way of telling the user-agent how long is the document, and if the response was cut in the middle due to a server fault as described above, the user-agent/sneaky-caching-proxy might cache incorrect responses. If the server also sends an ETag along with the response, the caching entity will store this ETag along with the invalid cached representation, and even when it’s time to check the representation’s freshness with the origin server, the server will just take a look at the ETag, say “yep, this is fine”, tell the cache to keep using the bad representation and <sinister>never ever let it recover</sinister>. If this happens on a large ISP’s transparent cache, easily tens of thousand of your users could be affected. If the affected resource is a common element in many of your pages with strict syntax checking, like a javascript resource, you’re kinda screwed. The only hope in such a condition is that the client, for some reason, will specify Cache-Control: no-cache in the request, and that caching entities along the path to the server will honour this request. Browsers like caching, so they won’t usually request no-cache, although AFAIK, recently Chrome started sending no-cache when the user explicitly requests a force-reload (Cmd-R on a Mac). Other browsers don’t fare as well, and I think that hoping one of your Chrome users will force reload the bad resource in time to save the day is hardly a sturdy solution.

Bottom line is, it’s really important to know when a representation of a resource is broken. Which is why I was quite amazed to learn that my HTTP server of choice, nginx, doesn’t validate the Content-Length it receives from its upstreams and is simply unaware when the response it received from an upstream server is chopped off. If your response specifies a content length but closes the connection without delivering enough bytes, nginx will simply stall the request for a long time without closing the connection downstream, even though it has no hope of receiving additional data to push downstream. I tried this both with proxy_pass and uwsgi_pass, but I’m quite confident it’s true for other backends (fastcgi_pass, scgi_pass, etc). This is bad, but not as bad as the case where you want an nginx module to manipulate your content, removing existing content length/transfer encoding and applying its own (the gzip module indeed does that). If a backend error occurs while content-length-oblivious-nginx is altering the data, the content altering module will apply what it applies to the bytes it received, add new content-length/transfer-encoding, assuring everyone the response is OK, and entice user-agents or even proxies to enter the almost-never-recover bad cache scenario I described in the previews paragraph. Ouch!

The proper way to fix this, IMHO, is that nginx simply must start looking at the upstream’s content length (or transfer encoding, once nginx starts using chunked responses with its upstreams). Part of the reason I’m writing this post is that Maxim Dounin, venerable nginx comitter and an OK chap overall, told me he doesn’t consider this a top priority at the moment, but I humbly disagree with his assessment of how serious the issue is. Until such a time as nginx is fixed about this, I think you must disable all content-manipulating nginx modules and instead handle all message length affecting work in your upstream (compression, addition, etc). This is what I opted to do with my django based web app, I replaced nginx’s gzip module with Django’s GZipMiddleware. It’s a terrible shame though. It’s doing the job of nginx for it, probably in a lesser fashion than how nginx could, it violates a must not clause in Python’s WSGI PEP333, and I have empiric proof that Tim Berners-Lee chokes a kitten every time you do it.

But what’s the alternative? Risk invisibly cached corrupt data for an undetermined length of time? Ditch nginx, which I think is the best HTTP server on this planet despite this debacle? Nah. Both are unacceptable.

1 This post assumes convenient values of “absolutely certain”; also, everything related to security/content tampering is out of scope in this post. I’m talking about possibly misbehaving but certainly well-meaning components.